If I had a hammer (renovation update)

Its been a big day here today, we got a LOT of painting done. Our bedroom is just about finished! That’s almost two rooms done. There’s a good chance depending on how much we get done tomorrow that we might get to putting colour on the third room too!

I think we will end up tackling the lounge room next. Its really the last room we’ll get done before Grape arrives and is about as far as we can go as the rest of the house will get finished after the renovations are done. Its also really bugging me now seeing how good the other rooms look!

Today we also went and got some carpet samples..its pretty hard to choose carpet colour. I shouldn’t be surprised, its hard to choose everything. We’ve got someone organised to come around next week and measure up though which is good. And we also organised a blinds place to come and measure up too. But once the carpet is in it means we can move furniture back into the rooms. Right now our loungeroom has all our bedroom furniture in it and I’m over it!

We are super excited about setting up Grape’s room! (but more on that in another post).

We finally got our building approval from council and the plumber has said he will maybe start next week. The builder is away on holidays for another week but hopefully can start soon after that too. Fingers crossed! Please don’t let me down tradies, my patience is wearing very very thin!

We’ve likely got some asbestos that needs taking care of as well. It won’t impact our start, but its under the eaves of the house where we’re extending to put in the new entrance so it needs addressing. I’ve contacted a place in Melbourne who talked us through taking a sample to send to them for testing (us taking a sample = the man taking a sample).

What else? We’re waiting to hear back from ‘pool fence guy’ on replacing the fence before October when it has to be registered in NSW. He gave us a pretty good quote so we’re keen to get it done ASAP.

We need to contact the heating & cooling place and work out getting refrigerated cooling put in (we had our ducted system set up for it but haven’t paid the extra to get it done yet). But not sure how Grape will go with an Albury summer and no air conditioning anywhere but the lounge room. Depending on the price for that Grape might need to toughen up!

Also waiting on a quote from the flooring place about floorboards for the entrance and downstairs, they are confident they can match the rest of the house so will be interesting to see the price on that.

We’ve had some issues with the whiz bang IXL light we put in the bathroom. Ironically it is pretty crap compared to the one we had in there before hand. I think part of the crapness is that it came with CFL globes. Apparently you can replace these with 50w halogens so we’re planning on doing that once its working properly. But the worst thing is that it makes a ‘clicking’ noise every few minutes. We’ve tested the fan, light and heater separately and its the heater making the noise. So IXL sent an electrician to replace the unit with a new one. Still clicking. Apparently its a known problem?

I sent a sharply worded email to the service centre on Friday afternoon about how unimpressed I was. Especially because the IXL electrician said he’d be there between 8-9am on Friday. He arrived at 9:30am. Then it took him 90 minutes to install. And it STILL isn’t fixed. Only 30 minutes late, but still. Do they think people don’t have to go to work? Turning up at 9:30 when you tell me you will be there ‘first thing’…?

Speaking of electricians, ours finally got back in touch. I think he must have been nervous about giving us the bill. He said he still had some adjustments to make so I pretended to be horrified at the price and said I hoped the ‘some’ adjustments were a LOT of adjustments. Another new bike gone. And they still have probably a days worth of work to go. The price wasn’t horrific but we kind of hoped for the amount it is that that would have been for the whole job. But we really did love the guy they sent out.

Anyway, phew. That’s enough for now! But we’re super proud of how its coming along.